Sorrow's Path

A genuine contender for the worst card ever printed, and worth studying precisely because of how thoroughly its design backfires. The ability tries to grant an attacker a defensive trick: reshuffle two of a defender's blockers so they swap assignments. But the resolution condition is so restrictive (each creature must be legally able to block everything the other was blocking) that the situations where it does anything are vanishingly rare, and in nearly all of them the swap accomplishes nothing the attacker wanted. The land was clearly meant to evoke a treacherous mountain pass where you could redirect an enemy's forces against each other, and the flavor reads better than it plays. Then there is the second clause, which is the part that turns a useless card into an actively dangerous one: every time the land taps, including when you tap it for its own ability, it burns you and your whole board for 2. So the only way to use the effect is to damage yourself and everything you control, in exchange for an outcome that almost never matters. It is the rare card whose downside is structurally welded to its only function, with no upside to balance against. As a historical artifact it has become a touchstone for design conversations about over-restricted abilities and self-defeating costs, the card people reach for when they want to point at how badly a clever idea can collapse on the table.